Because you never know which blog post will be your greatest hit.
Because you have a voice and you must use it.
It doesn’t mean you should ship subpar work. On the contrary, it is the opposite:
Ship the best work you can do that day.
Write a song once per month and you have an album by the end of the year.
Write 250 words per day and you have a book by the end of the year.
Produce one water color picture per day and that’s enough to make a living.
Shipping is the key.
Progress over perfection.
The only purpose of a meeting or a presentation is to change the emotion in the room.
Nothing else matters.
All the logistics can be sent via an email.
All the facts can be Googled.
What we need is to be convinced. A story we want to tell ourselves and to others (i.e. the board, the boss, our spouse, donors, etc.).
Change the emotion to change the world. If the meeting is to reassure ourselves, skip it and find something more interesting to talk about.
It’s possible for someone to travel all the lands of the earth.
We have the means, we have the know how. Because the earth is finite, one could literally see everything.
And then what?
The questions I have is this:
Is knowledge limited to what we can see and experience?
Is a gut feeling enough of a witness?
Is faith simply enough?
What every paradox teaches us is that something can totally be true and still not be provable.
When we explore all the edges, what’s left?
I would argue that is where things get interesting.
Think about it.
A general act of kindness to alleviate someone’s pain or frustration is priceless. But we don’t know what to do when we are in someone else’s debt.
The first reaction is reciprocity. This for that. Make things equal. But it can’t ever be equal. There is no way to measure how grateful you when you are down for the count. There is no yield to calculate unless money or product is changing hands.
The second is to pay it forward. I know this is semantics but I have a hard time with the word “pay”. We don’t do acts of kindness for money, we do it for community. We do it because it is the right thing to do.
The other option is to simply accept the gift. Don’t diminish the work that someone was trying to do. Don’t bring a lousy side salad to a dinner someone spent all day making. Don’t leave a gift card sending a signal for what that person’s time was worth.
Just say thank you. Take the gift.
The snow was mostly subpar this season. Long stretches of no snow fall. Most of the early season terrain didn’t even open up until mid-January. That began a stretch of about five Saturday pow days in a row. Which also began the parking armageddon up the canyons.
Saturdays were usually the day we could start later because no one in the group was hustling to get to work. No longer. You have to be going up Big Cottonwood Canyon no later than 7:00 am and Little Cottonwood Canyon you have to be parking at Alta by 5:30 am.
Another disappointment this season was the touchy snowpack. At first, it looked like we were going to get a clean slate. The first big storm cycle brought 30″ and afterwards the tap shut off, making it by far the worst snowpack I have seen in the Wasatch since I have started skiing. The Wilson Glade incident put a dark cloud over everybody. Everyone knows Chris and the team at The Gear Room. Tragic what has happened. It was inspiring to see the community rally around them.
This season I made a bigger emphasis on looking for wind drifted snow. In the past, these were the small avalanches I have triggered the most. I wanted to get better at identifying the pillowing, paying attention to the direction of the wind and what the speeds were for the day. As always with avalanche hunting, you are neither lucky nor good but I’m happy to report I didn’t trigger anything of significance this season and was pleased with the danger being so high all of winter.
I also earned the nickname “Hall Monitor” in the group. I caught this picture of 11 skiers coming up a slide path on a high danger day. The UAC did a good job reposting and educating the influx of new skiers this season. Had a lot of fun this season posting observations and seeing them reposted.
In total, I got 50 ski days in! A new personal best. I think in a normal snowpack (with more stability) that number could have easily hit 60. 150,112 vertical feet for the season with an average of 3,000 foot per tour. Not bad at all. I only skied one day in March. The second storm cycle that month, I was in Costa Rica. It was probably the only storm I missed this season.
The biggest storm cycle we had was a season saving 7 footer! We also saw a death rose during this time too. Most of the old timers posted that they have never seen that occur before. That snow storm didn’t have the most amazing snow to ski unfortunately. By the time the canyons opened it had settled considerably. In fact, Snowbird got some rain in the end. However, it did help stretch the season and for that many of us were grateful.
A disappointing end to the season was Alta announced that they would be starting paid parking up Grizzly. There are only two places to park in Little, near the resorts or White Pine. That’s really it unless you are doing some of the bigger lines on the divide. This will further complicate the pow days on the weekends going forward.
Notable ski runs this season:
The rest of the season was in the regular, low angle spots: Mill D, Beartrap, Silver Fork, Point Supreme Area, Grizzly. This season I wanted to explore White Pine–got to do that at the very end. I wanted to get over 100K and smashed that. Also wanted to do a 10K day in there. Mission accomplished.
I can tell by my last tour, I was done making difficult decision this seasons. Backcountry skiers have to make thousands of small decisions that make a big impact. Sometimes life or death. With the challenges this season, I was just done.
Gear wise I also got to do some splurging. The new Scarpa F1 LT are a game changer in terms of stiffness to lightweight and mobility. Highly recommend if you can get it to fit. I also tried the Plum 150s and they have not disappointed. I have been pleased how they have ejected when I need them to. Lastly, I finally pulled the trigger on the Voile Hyper V6s. The easiest ski I have ever used. I didn’t know skis could be so fun. This will be the new set ups going forward.
Either they were fast
or
You were slow.
If you were one of the last to switch over to a smartphone or from DVD’s to digital, it might be worth assessing where do you land on the curve below?
Roger’s theory of diffusion of innovation explains the rate of how ideas spread. The questions that come to mind:
Do people still believe climate change is just about temperature?
Do critics actually know what critical race theory is?
Do you believe the last presidential election was stolen?
Why would someone still be waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine?
Perhaps the problem isn’t how people fall for conspiracy theories but rather their ability to adopt new ideas.
Some move fast, others slow.
On Twitter, fake news travels six times faster than the truth.
People don’t have to prove something to be true with data or evidence but rather create enough confusion around a subject that makes it difficult for others to understand.
There’s no friction when your friends post misinformation about the COVID vaccines. All you need to do is to click the like button or share for the meme to spread. Much more difficult to verify. Much more difficult to voice your concerns amongst your peers.
There has not been one single reported death because of the COVID-19 vaccine. Not one out of the 268 million doses administered. On the other hand, COVID-19 has killed over 585,000 people at the time of this post. And yet, because of the misinformation that spreads it causes many of us to hesitate. To blink.
Let’s be clear, misinformation is far more dangerous than bold face lies. Having threads of truth intertwined with fiction makes a compelling story for people to tell and to stick.
We think of resilience as this idea that when adversity comes, we find a way to overcome it.
That is a very narrow way of looking at the world.
Resilience isn’t necessarily about the will power to fight through difficulty but rather the ability to find the resources you need when you are in trouble.
I’ve been reading about my genealogy lately.
Going back to my great, great, great, great, great grandparents, I found James and Elizabeth Allred, the first Mormons to be baptized.
Seven generations later, there are many Latter-day Saints still practicing.
Think about that.
The decision of two people made in 1832 has lead a course for so many down the road.
Decisions hold significance. More than we give them credit for.
And it isn’t just religion. It could be whether you decide to go to college, where you live, starting a family business, deciding to be sober…
Good or bad, your decisions will influence the generations to come.
When is the last time you challenged a deeply held belief you have?
We are so sure of ourselves that what we have practiced and what we have been taught is the correct way to live.
When we choose a lens to see the world, we are filtering data. Cherry picking what we see to reaffirm our beliefs.
Not often do we go back and question what we believe is true. Overtime, we create a story in how we see the world, ignoring the other narratives.
Was the source of our knowledge correct? What if they were wrong? Sure, each of our belief systems have some form of truth to them. The most powerful narratives always do. It certainly not the whole picture though.
Why do I believe what I believe?
That is a fundamental question for exploration.
When we open ourselves to other possibilities, are humble in admitting we are wrong–a whole bunch of things open up.
Truth can be a painful lesson. It is also our responsibility to seek it.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the state of our mental health with the work we do. And I often think that the source of bitterness is the unresolved tension of what a deeply held world view creates when it is inconsistent from what we actually know.
The little voice in my head is often reminding me: “I don’t want to question or scratch the surface of that one thing because it is too close to my identity of who I am. Are you with us or against us?”
Josh Allred's Blog 